Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory developed a pinpointed sound beam that can detect buried land mines from a safe distance. Called a parametric acoustic array, the device is made up of ceramic transducers -- devices that emit a powerful narrow acoustic beam at ultrasonic frequencies. One...

Embedded Technology magazine features board-level electronics and COTS solutions for design engineers, as well as a variety of product offerings. The January issue of Embedded Technology contains a feature story on “Sensor Interface Design Demystified.” In this article, Dr. Kevin A. Shaw, director of...

The Interrelation Miner Methodology is a technology for multivariate statistical data analysis and outcome prediction (data mining) of either complex and/or multidimensional data sets, or of very small datasets based on statistical fuzzy set theory. This tool can be applied to any complicated data set with many samples...

This technology has solved the problem of adding beneficial lactic-acid-producing bacteria (LAB) to both wet and dry foods that undergo processing with heat and pressure. The bacterial strain is able to withstand harsh manufacturing regimes including high- compression tableting, coating, highshear blending,...

A semi-empirical method of optical characterization of thin contaminant films on surfaces of optical components has been conceived. The method was originally intended for application to films that become photochemically deposited on such optical components as science windows, lenses, prisms,...

A proposed video guidance sensor (VGS) would be based mostly on the hardware and software of a prior Advanced VGS (AVGS), with some additions to enable it to function as a time-of-flight rangefinder (in contradistinction to a triangulation or image-processing rangefinder). It would typically be...

The Plug-in Image Component Widget (PICWidget) is a software component for building digital imaging applications. The component is part of a methodology described in “GIS Methodology for Planning Planetary-Rover Operations” (NPO-41812), which appears elsewhere in this issue of NASA Tech Briefs. Planetary rover missions return a...

"X-2000 Anomaly Detection Language" denotes a developmental computing language, and the software that establishes and utilizes the language, for fusing two diagnostic computer programs, one implementing a numerical analysis method, the other implementing a symbolic analysis method into a unified...

A general-purpose computer program for planning the actions of a spacecraft or other complex system has been augmented by incorporating a subprogram that reasons about uncertainties in such continuous variables as times taken to perform tasks and amounts of resources to be consumed. This...

A computer program implements a mathematical model of the radiation-belt and ring-current plasmas resulting from interactions between the solar wind and the Earth's magnetic field, for the purpose of predicting fluxes of energetic electrons (10 keV to 5 MeV) and protons (10 keV to 1 MeV),...

JMS Proxy and C/C++ Client SDK ("JMS" signifies "Java messaging service" and "SDK" signifies "software development kit") is a software package for developing interfaces that enable legacy programs (here denoted "clients") written in the C and C++ languages to communicate with each other via a JMS broker. This package...

A computer program generates Extensible Markup Language (XML) files that effect coupling between the command- and telemetry-handling software running aboard a spacecraft and the corresponding software running in ground support systems. The XML files are produced by use of information from the flight...

Ripples is a computer program that makes it possible to specify arbitrarily complex space-flight systems in an easy-tolearn, high-level programming language and to have the specification automatically translated into LibSim, which is a textbased computing language in which such simulations are...